Why It's Risky
To Puff on a Hookah
In Queens, N.Y.

NEW YORK -- The Egyptian Cafe is in Astoria, a section of Queens, the most multiethnic borough of this cosmopolitan city. At midnight one Friday, everybody there was smoking. Not cigarettes, but hookahs -- the glass hubble-bubbles puffed from Casablanca to Islamabad.

As they rolled backgammon dice and shuffled dominoes, though, not one smoker sipped anything stronger than mint tea. In New York, that makes the Egyptian Cafe...